Bingo Paraphernalia

oh god I actually have emotions about this X Factor thing. Stop making me feel my own feelings, ridiculous television.

On Remembrance Sunday

jhnbrssndn:

“Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war.  They seek, when the memory challenges the myth, to obliterate or hide the evidence that exposes the myth as lie.  The destruction is pervasive, aided by an establishment, including the media, which apes the slogans and euphemisms parroted by the powerful.  Because nearly everyone in wartime is complicit, it is difficult for societies to confront their own culpability and the lie that led to it.”

Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

Regular readers may, like my own children, be a little baffled by my apparent obsession with, and opposition to, our war.  I am no less surprised to find myself, nearing 50, shouting at the TV as our elected leaders and their faithful stenographers in the media spurt more lies so that yet another generation may know the infinite indignities of armed conflict.

As Britain has sprouted its annual harvest of commemorative poppies ahead of today’s marches, church services and memorial ceremonies, it has coincided (if that’s the right word) with the news that a number of British soldiers have been killed by an Afghan policeman.  We are also reminded that it is 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The siren voices of newspapers command us to “never forget”, but in truth they are calling us to participate in a national act of selective amnesia.  Never forget the fallen. Never forget to honour our forces.  Never forget to support the “heroes” who invaded and occupy Afghanistan.  But to remember the fact that our attack on that country eight years ago was an act of revenge and aggression; that our subsequent attack on Iraq, while more controversial, was no more or less in contravention of the Nuremberg Principles; that we were sold the fall of the Wall as promising a Peace Dividend; that the same people gain from war now as they did in 1914, and it is being fuelled by the same young men and women on a diet of the same lies, is not welcome.

As a child in the 1960s, for whom the nightly TV pictures of Vietnam were someone else’s war, I grew up genuinely, stupidly, believing that the 1939-45 war that still filled our culture and our national myth was the stuff of the past.  Unaware, then, of the dirty wars, the proxy wars, the coups and the low-intensity conflicts with which countries like mine maintained their stranglehold on wealth and power, I would have simply not believed that my middle years would see my country invading and bombing others for no reason.  I can scarcely believe it now.  And the war fever I see all around me seems as alien and frightening as it would to my childhood self 40 years ago.

Q.I.

drunkenboat:

On the word “hello”, as opposed to “hullo”

Stephen Fry : It just meant an expression of surprise—”Hullo, what have we got here?” “Hullo, what’s this?” And we still use it in that sense.

Bill Bailey: Do we?

Stephen Fry: … Don’t we, Bill?

Bill Bailey: Yes, when we live our lives like 1950s detective films, yes. I often go to my fridge, “Hullo, we’re out of milk. I say, mother, where’s the milk?”

Stephen Fry: You beast, you beast, you utter, utter, beast.